Weekly high-tech hot topics in the blogs: Black Friday tech deals

Hot topics in the tech blogs for the week of November 27: the suggestion of an alliance forming between Microsoft and News Corp., Black Friday technology deals, Google Maps Navigation rolls out to mobiles running Android 1.6, Amazon wirelessly updates Kindle firmware, and the data consumption of smartphones.

News Corp. delisting from Google's search index, forming alliance with Microsoft
A few weeks ago News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch implied he was considering removing all News Corp sites from search engine indexes to avoid people freely accessing sites that normally require paid subscriptions. This week's top technology headlines included the news that Microsoft was holding talks with News Corp. representatives to strike an indexing deal. Bloggers wrote about the pros and cons of the collaboration and expressed what it could mean for Google, News Corp., news readers and the future of online journalism.

Black Friday deals
Articles about this year's mammoth November 27 Black Friday sales in the US ranged from TechCrunch's "Google Turning Times Square Into A Giant Voice Search Experiment On Black Friday" to Slate's "Black Friday Is for Suckers". Technology blogs provided helpful information for eager shoppers about where to go for the best deals, how to search the web for the best Black Friday deals, how your smartphone can help you save money and which electronics products you shouldn't buy during the Black Friday sales.

Google Maps Navigation for Android 1.6
On November 23 Google announced that it would be expanding the free features of Google Maps Navigation to mobile devices running on the 1.6 (Donut) version of its Android mobile operating system as one of its many holiday "gifts" to its band of faithful consumers. The GPS Navigation roll-out enables mobile users still on Android 1.6 (i.e., the majority of Android users) to use their mobiles like a portable GPS Navigation system with voice guidance and on-the-go rerouting.

Amazon Kindle updates
On November 24 Amazon provided its e-Reading customers with two updates - one that would enable to them to read PDFs and another that extended battery life by up to 85 percent. Amazon announced that all new Kindles would ship with the firmware updates and consumers who purchased recent version of the Kindle would receive an automatic updates. While technology bloggers agreed these two updates were good news for Kindle customers, they were much more cautious about the automatic update procedure that would take place in the background without the user's consent. Geoffrey A. Fowler at the Wall Street Journal Blogs: Digits was one of many bloggers who questioned Amazon's automatic upgrading policies and reminded readers that Amazon had previously come under fire for autonomously deleting books from user's e-readers without their permission.

iPhone nabs 50 percent of mobile data globally - or doesn't (depending on the blog you read)
The iPhone is a never-ending source of discussion for technology bloggers, and a mobile metrics report from Google-owned mobile advertising company Admob got tongues wagging about Apple's superphone again this week. The report measured the number of ad requests received from Admob's network of around 15,000 mobile websites and not all mobile data. Apple-centric blog the Apple Insider ran an article with the headline "Apple iPhone eats up 50% share of all mobile data traffic globally" while Jared Newman from Yahoo! Tech News wrote an article with the headline, "iPhone Hogs Half of World's Mobile Data? Not Really."

Technorati's list of Top 5 movers in the Top Technology blogs recorded on November 27:
1. The Windows Blog - http://windowsteamblog.com/
2. Google LatLong - http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/
3. Gadget Venue - http://GadgetVenue.com
4. istartedsomething - http://www.istartedsomething.com
5. NewTeeVee - http://newteevee.com